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Iftop is what I downloaded to see my daily internet usage of my computer or any other computer on my LAN (ie bro and sisters usage). I want total MB's/day from each computer. so I installed and ran sudo iftop and I get a screen just like the website says I should except, no domains or IP's or anything, its an empty chart. Is there a command I have to tell it to monitor my local network? I know there's activity I am surfing right now. Yes I read the webpage, no I did not glean a how to use, so it must be that "common knowledge" thing I am missing.

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  • You are using wired or wireless? And I think for your purposes vnstat is needed, not iftop.
    – falconer
    Dec 11, 2013 at 21:10
  • thanks Jack Jefferson this worked with me it was sudo iftop -i wlp2s0
    – elswerky
    May 13, 2017 at 1:14

2 Answers 2

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iftop display Network Interface Bandwidth Usage. To install iftop if not installed, just press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open Terminal. When it opens, run the command(s) below:

sudo apt-get install iftop

By default iftop command displays the bandwidth usage of the first available Ethernet device.

sudo iftop

Or you can also specify an interface using the -i option.

sudo iftop -i eth0

While iftop is running, you can press any one of the following keys to display more output.

S - display source port
D - display destination port
n - show IP instead of host name
1/2/3 - sort by the specified column
< - sort by source name
> - sort by destination name
P - pause display ( else it will be often updated to show the current status )
j/k - scroll display
? - for help

The image below shows the different arguments (options) that you can use with iftop.

enter image description here

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Iftop is probably set up to use a different network interface. Run the command ifconfig to see your connections. Then if, for example, your connection is named eth0 run the command sudo iftop -i eth0. Hope this solved your problem.

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  • this worked, thank you Jack Jefferson. and thank you Mitch for taking the time to respond. "sudo iftop -i wlan0" gave the desired result. also used the "-p" option. Now all I need to know is how do I do the highlighting code that shows the commands like you do.
    – user129041
    Dec 12, 2013 at 6:06
  • code is typed with a ` either side. That's the key above tab (on a standard UK keyboard), not an apostrophe.
    – Jack Jefferson
    Dec 12, 2013 at 17:41

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